Tab support is one of the features, and you can switch between tabs using the Alt+Left or Alt+Right keys.

Options to quickly comment or uncomment code are also available in the Edit menu.

You can split the current window horizontally or vertically:

In the Tools menu there are two quick options to sort lines or to sort and eliminate double entries (Sort | Uniq). These tools can be configured and more can be added via the Preferences window (see below).

The Preferences window offers some rich configuration options for the interface and general behavior. Over Gedit, the options are more abundant in Medit.

And here’s a powerful feature, which allows you to write your own tools directly in Medit:

Plugins are also supported in Medit, and several come bundled by default:

Some other features include shortcuts configuration, search and replace, bookmarks, text wrapping.

Overall, I think you can find Medit as the perfect replacement for Gedit, in that it blends well in GNOME and it comes with more features and powerful configuration tools. The ability to write your own tools (in various languages) directly in the Preferences window is a nice touch and a productive feature.

Installing Medit in Ubuntu 14.04

Trusty comes with version 1.1.1, and the PPA doesn’t have the latest release, so you can compile and install it from source by following the next easy steps.

Now change the current working directory to medit-1.2.0 and issue the following commands to compile and install it:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Or, you can install it as normal user by specifying a prefix:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr
make
make install

In this case, the program will be installed as $HOME/usr/medit, so you may add $HOME/usr to your $PATH variable.

]]>http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/04/medit-1-2-0-gnome-alternative-to-gedit-ubuntu-installation/feed/0KKEdit 0.0.32 Released – Overview & Ubuntu Installationhttp://www.tuxarena.com/2014/03/kkedit-0-0-32-released-overview-ubuntu-installation/
http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/03/kkedit-0-0-32-released-overview-ubuntu-installation/#commentsWed, 26 Mar 2014 23:25:00 +0000http://www.tuxarena.com/?p=3265KKEdit is a text editor based on GTK3 for GNOME, currently under development, with several useful features for the average programmer.

The latest release, 0.0.32, came out a few hours ago, and includes several new features, like two new menu entries, New Editor and New Admin Editor, two fixes in the source highlighting dropdown list, and several other minor fixes.

KKEdit comes with syntax highlighting for various languages, tabs support (the new tab shortcut being Ctrl+N), sessions, recent files, indentation, line numbers, bookmarks and different themes.

KKEdit has syntax highlighting for many languages, including C, PHP or Bash:

KKEdit can also be used as a hex editor:

The configuration window allows you to enable or disable features like: auto indentation, showing line numbers, wrapping lines, highlighting current line; here you can also set the tab width, theme, font and hide or show taskbar entries.

Configuring KKEdit – all the important options are located in one place:

The help window integrates the homepage, viewable as HTML, and has extensive support regarding the features and usage of KKEdit.

As a downside, there are still few bugs, but nothing major: for example the editor crashed with a segmentation fault message when clicking the Go to Definition button in the taskbar when no source file was loaded. Same goes for the Cut/Copy/Paste buttons, which should probably be inactive when no file is loaded. These are minor though since there is no reason to use them when you’re not editing any file. Also, the interface could be built to be a bit different regarding the size and placement of buttons inside child windows.

Overall, other than the few bugs, KKEdit is a really decent editor, made to meet specific needs, and it could use a try if you are searching for an alternative to your current GNOME editor.

]]>http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/03/kkedit-0-0-32-released-overview-ubuntu-installation/feed/0Overview of Kate Editor in KDE 4.12.3http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/03/overview-of-kate-editor-in-kde-4-12-3/
http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/03/overview-of-kate-editor-in-kde-4-12-3/#commentsSun, 16 Mar 2014 18:11:00 +0000http://www.tuxarena.com/?p=3119Kate (the KDE Advanced Text Editor) is the well known, powerful text editor that ships by default in KDE, and has plenty of powerful features for both simple text editing as well as programmers. Some of the notable functions that it offers include indentation, syntax highlighting for hundreds of programming languages, block-selection mode or spell-checking.

Over the years, Kate received a lot of new features and many improvements, turning it into a feature-complete editor with support for a huge number of languages.

It’s a really fast and powerful tool for programmers, since it can be used for both simple text editing, as well as source code in any language, keeping a pretty light interface.

Except for the menu and the toolbar, the interface is divided in three major sections, as well as a bottom bar for the search and replace function. To the left there is a side panel listing open documents or projects, while the bottom status bar provides information about current line and column, filename and encoding. The rest of the window is taken up by the editing area itself, which can list line numbers or display arrows to collapse or extend blocks or code or functions. Kate properly detects function begin and end in various languages, so this feature is quite useful and improves readability, helping you to make your way in a large source file and focus on the active task.

Collapsing or extending functions:

Kate can work with multiple files at once, organizing them in the Documents panel to the left. Firefox-style shortcuts like Ctrl+W to close the current document are also available in Kate. Except for single-file editing, Kate allows you to create and save projects as a collection of files.

The View menu will allow you to split the current document window horizontally or vertically, the vertical mode being quite useful for widescreens.

Kate provides a recent files list for quick access to the last files that you edited (available
via the File->Open Recent menu entry), as well as an Open With menu to open the current file in another application. Exporting the current file to HTML is also possible, and Kate will create an HTML file formatted according to the indentation of the current file, preserving the syntax highlighting colors as well.

One of the features implemented in Kate is the Vi-style editing mode, which allows to use Kate in the same manner as the popular console editor Vim. So the Vim users will feel at home once at the mode is enabled. While in this mode, press I to enter Insert mode and edit text, press Escape to enter Normal mode and use commands like :w or :q to save or quit Kate, as well as pressing H, J, K and L to navigate in the file. To enable this mode, to Edit->Vi Input Mode or press Alt+Ctrl+V.

Vim users will feel at home when the Vi mode is enabled:

Syntax highlighting is pretty complete in Kate. Except for definitions for the major languages out there like C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, PHP or markup languages like HTML/CSS, XML, Kate also comes with syntax highlighting for a lot of less used languages, as well as scripts in different languages, including Quake configuration files or even CubeScript used by AssaultCube. So regarding this feature, virtually any language is covered up.

Syntax highlighting covers a huge number of languages:

Indentation is another feature of Kate, and you can set in the settings if you want to use spaces or tabulators, as well as specifying the width of tabulators (default is 8 spaces, but this can be changed).

Kate has support for sessions, so when it runs it can start up clean with an empty file, or load the last sessions, or load a session of your choosing, and restore all the opened files in that session.

Tabs support is yet another cool feature, and you can use Firefox-like shortcuts to create a new document in a new tab (Ctrl+N) or to close the current tab (Ctrl+W).

Tabs in Kate:

There is also word completion support, to auto-complete a word met before in a fast manner.

Kate integrates spell-checking as well.

Other notable features include a search and replace module, fullscreen mode, bookmarks or the useful block selection mode.

Regarding the block-selection mode: being available in the Edit->Block Selection Mode menu entry or using the Ctrl+Shift+B keyboard shortcut, this feature allows you to select blocks of text, instead of whole lines, meaning you can select exactly the text up to a certain column. See the following screenshot:

One of the editing modes added recently is the Vi input style.

Kate has enough configuration options to fit most of the users out there, which will be able to make it behave differently than the default.

]]>http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/03/overview-of-kate-editor-in-kde-4-12-3/feed/3Bluefish – Powerful Editor for Developershttp://www.tuxarena.com/2014/03/bluefish-powerful-editor-for-developers/
http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/03/bluefish-powerful-editor-for-developers/#commentsSat, 08 Mar 2014 03:40:10 +0000http://www.tuxarena.com/?p=3100Bluefish is a powerful text editor aimed towards developers with features such as syntax highlighting, indentation, support for projects, auto-completion and more. Considering Linux is saturated with various text editors and integrated development environments ranging from the simplest to the more complex and feature-rich ones, let’s see what Bluefish offers for programmers and not only.

First of all, although it can be used for anything from text editing to C development, Bluefish aims towards web development, with extensive support for HTML/CSS and PHP, providing a list of all the HTML tags which can be inserted in the source page, which can be quite useful when you forgot the exact name of the tag.

The latest release is Bluefish 2.2.5, released on February 10th, with few minor bug fixes, faster syntax scanning engine, less memory usage for the file browser, improved indentation as well as improved syntax highlighting.

Bluefish is written in GTK and has a very fast start-up, as well as a logical designed interface.

The interface is pretty common, with a panel to the left for file browsing; a toolbar containing all the HTML/CSS tags for quick inserting; and the status bar which shows line numbers, current column, number of characters in the file, encoding and source file type. Clicking on a tag button will automatically insert both the starting and closing tags, and will set the cursor between them, a very useful functionality in my opinion.

Automatically insert starting and closing tags – Bluefish includes the new HTML5 tags as well as skeleton structures for tables and such:

Among many others, Bluefish offers a split-view mode, auto-completion, line numbers, and also the afore-mentioned tags and skeleton structures for elements such as <table>. Source files are opened in separate tabs, displayed to the bottom of the main editing area. Block-selection mode, bookmarks, an integrated character map, various formatting options, indenting/unindenting or commenting out blocks of code are also worthy features to mention.

The split view mode – horizontal only:

Files are opened in separate tabs displayed at the bottom:

Integrated character map – another useful feature:

Bluefish is highly configurable via the Preferences window:

It has support for a wide range of languages:

Although intended for web development, Bluefish has support for many languages, including C:

This is one application that I like a lot, and although I’m using Emacs and Kate, I always install Bluefish too just in case. I find Bluefish to be perfect for the scope it was intended to accomplish: web development in HTML/CSS and PHP. It can also be used to edit C sources or other source files, however its main purpose is to serve web developers. And it seems lightweight although it bundles quite a lot of features.